But in Ireland it was a victory of the
tenant over the landlord, and it was achieved by a new alliance between
tenant and priest against the landlord. While giving emancipation to
the Catholics, the Act of 1830 also raised the level of the franchise,
and abolished the forty shilling freehold vote, thus removing the
landlord's motive for preserving the small tenancies.
The result was that the Irish landlords as a class--always, of course,
with many conspicuous individual exceptions--entered from 1830 onwards
upon a new career of hostility towards their tenants, amounting to
little less than a passion for revenge. Being, for the most part, both
Protestant and Absentee, they lost all interest in their tenantry,
except that of rent collectors. The Irish famine made matters far
worse. For the famine deprived the Irish tenant, for the moment, of the
power of paying rent. Not only so, but by reducing him to pauperism it
turned him into a distinct and definite burden on the rates.
The Irish landlords then first conceived the idea that, by getting rid
of the people, they could save their pockets. At the same time, they
made the great discovery that beasts were more profitable than
peasants.
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